Alan Lowe- Roadstone Cost Effective Solution to Part L of the Building Regulations

What we're going to talk about this morning is just Part L of the building regulations and one of the solutions that we've also developed in terms of addressing thermal bridging. Derek, 2011 really came into the fore very last year, so I was presented with pointed challenges for the construction industry in terms of how we address thermal bridging in particular. But just a quick run through Part L of the building regulations in this area is that we're concerned with BER, EPC, essentially carbon performance coefficient, energy performance coefficients are mentioned, the 2020 targets, and that's essentially where this is coming from. Our Part L really steps things up in terms of performance, and it's around a 40% improvement from the previous version of the building regs, which is quite significant. Part L promotes the use of renewable resources, places a focus on the building fabric, looks at things like renewables. I certainly won't go on to that in this presentation as it's very short. What we really just have a look at is thermal bridging and how that works and is supplied. So you look at the micro-part, essentially this approach serves there are six tables which are kind of construction details with the Helm's be applied and must be used, and they totally care from familiar setting, but the U-value requirements are actually 0.21 and 0.15 U-value, your U-value. And you'll see along the left-hand side we find prism working just along the left-hand side here in your detail numbers, and they correspond to different construction details. So for each U-value, 0.21 and 0.15, there's what's called a psi-value, and the psi-value is really the key requirement in terms of reaching the U-value that must be addressed. So in terms of the building fabric, there are three basics essentially: getting it right obviously, your U-value has to be lower as mentioned before, a lot lower than we have before, really good U-values. And then the building fabric we have the psi-value or the thermal bridging factor, it must be addressed. If you can picture the thermal bridge, you obviously have a lot of those bridges around your house, and they're potentially the weak spots in your building where there's a discontinuation in your insulation, and that's actually where you're going to get thermal bridging. And also air tightness, because at the same time you're trying to keep the heat in the house, you're trying to keep the house airtight, and that's again one of the benefits with a concrete build, you render and close up concrete block wall and the deck becomes airtight and meets the apartment's needs.

So what is thermal bridging? Very simply, as I mentioned before, you've seen this image of a house where you have your construction building details, and as I said before, that's potentially a weak spot in your building where you will potentially get thermal bridging. You see there the geographic presence is very well around the windows, at floor level, at eaves level, anywhere where the insulation stops, where you're forced to essentially have competent concrete with no insulation, that's potentially where you're going to get your thermal bridging, and that needs to be addressed. One of the concerns I suppose with building now is the U-values now are so good, as low as I mentioned before, 0.12, 0.15 U-values, you're providing essentially potential for surface condensation and potentially mold growth in your buildings. So by addressing thermal bridging, you're not only improving the thermal performance, you're also reducing the risk of mold growth in your house. So I mentioned before the psi factor, and the reason it's so important in terms of bridging, seeing this graphic, this is taken from the back of the Part L building regs, but there's a length to the building junction. So when you're working on a psi factor for your DEAP assessments, you can see the calculation area of your psi-value for your building detail multiplied by the length, and that's the void appointed the total area of the building. So really important factor that needs to be considered now when you're building. The thermal block solution, just to take you to that, essentially it's a robust, durable, lightweight concrete block. One of the requirements for concrete blocks is that we know the minimum strength requirement for concrete blocks is set in I.S. EN 771, it's gone from 5 N/mm². It has a lambda value of 0.15, and when compared to standard concrete blocks, it's a 30% improvement. Excellent adhesive properties to mortar and render, so mortar is as good as they are. Concrete block solution, it's an easy fix, you can put standard fixings into it, you can plaster and render it, so other benefits to it. We can use standard construction methods, so you can choose the construction details from Part L without getting too fancy in terms of construction. And American software training, that's very important that we adopt standard construction methods across the industry. The block has to be CE marked system to close like any concrete block, complies with the relevant standards. And very important for on the design side, it provides a lot of design flexibility, and I'll take you through that as we go along. The approach that we've taken, the wrong stone is that we've taken, I mentioned before, all the construction building details we thermally modeled, featured in building details or the construction details with the Roadstone thermal light block. So you'll see on this, again apologies in its newest policy, on the top left-hand side you have your detail number, on the left-hand side here you have the psi-value for that particular detail we thermally modeled. And on the right-hand side there, we've also opted for the risk of surface condensation, so we've accounted for thermal bridging but also we've accounted for surface condensation. So very, very important. So we modeled at this stage over 250 construction details, so that's the level of comfort that we're offering to builders and designers that this thermal modeling has been carried out using Therm.

So how can the construction industry address requirements of Part L? And if you're not familiar with Part L, apologies, we are over, understand it's a very short presentation but I wanted to take you through it. There are three options essentially for compliance. The first option is to not use the acceptable construction details from Part L. What that applies is a very penalizing psi-value of 0.15 in terms of your DEAP assessments. Your second option is full compliance with acceptable construction details, so take all the details from Part L and put those into your building, and that means that you can claim a psi-value of 0.08. So you can see that the way things are flowing, as your compliance is improved, your psi-value becomes lower, and your psi-value is really, really important in terms of your DEAP assessment and your BER rating that can be achieved. Better or equivalent psi-values. The Roadstone thermal light block is the most important one that we're offering at the end here, is that if you are thermally modeling the details using the light block as we have done, it allows you to claim a much lower psi-value of lowest 0.03 through your building. And this is where we are at this stage. We have a lot of experience with us, we've been working with it on the design side for the last well on so, a lot of experience in terms of the benefits that can be achieved. I'll try and illustrate some of those to you. We have a number of officers over, understand that this is essentially a small chart that takes you through the whole process of how your assessment is carried out. You can see on the top left-hand side you start with your thermal conductivity of your concrete block, which is a low lambda value, that takes you through to your U-value and your psi-value. And I mentioned before with the psi-value and psi-values, this is where your psi is coming from, your thermal bridging. Over at the fireside, then you also have your U-values in your new construction, so I mentioned at 0.21 or 0.15, so having a low psi-value is very, very important to your DEAP assessment. They feed into your DEAP assessment and essentially give you your BER rating for your house. There's a lot of other factors all going on in the background, renewables and structure factors and help, but in terms of this presentation, it's really about the psi-value and U-value in your building. So where would you expect the user also in terms of a block to achieve the best psi-value? I've given a few examples here. This is the ground floor detail, obviously needed in every house, and over, understand, we have a full-scale model of this ground floor detail. We have to make sure you have a wall again, a very, very important detail because it's a high psi-value around the periphery of your house. The solid separating masonry wall through ground floor to your block can fly again, your potential for bridging. So you'll see there, I should have pointed out, your Roadstone thermal block is the corner block in the detail. We also have, we've developed an L-block for the window detail, window reveal, which is a big issue. We'll delve into detail that's contained in Part L and stuff, essentially it means you have an open cavity, and for builders it's very, very difficult to fix windows to it. So we have an L-block solution, and we again, we certainly have enough to prove that it works very well. The other service that we're offering for builders and designers is that we will actually provide you with a psi-value certificate for your project. So if you come to us at the design stage and say you have a project where you want to incorporate Roadstone thermal block, we will back you up with that design service and we will back you up with all the modeling. We have a certified thermal modeler, and we will give you a certified psi-value. It's very important to find out that your psi-value certification and your modeling has to be carried out by a certified thermal modeler, and we have one on board. So again, that's a service we can offer. So in terms of the benefits, there are two approaches that can be taken in terms of addressing thermal bridging using the Roadstone thermal block. The first one is to achieve an improved BER rating, and again with a lot of case studies to back this up, typically we can step up one level. So you start with a B or a C, we find in most cases we can take you to B or A. The second approach that can be taken from the builder's perspective, as you can appreciate probably a lot more popular with builders, is that we can achieve some reductions in the building cost. Again, just to outline the importance of bridging, if you address thermal bridging, you're able to claim benefits on the other side in terms of reduced fabric costs, insulation costs. But again, it's a choice that needs to be made, I know, with appropriate living costs. So we have a couple of case studies. Again, time is short in this presentation, so I can't present all of them, but we took a few different house types. This particular one was a semi-detached house. There were 16 construction details in this house. Again, we're selling not just the thermal block, we're also selling standard concrete block. It doesn't need to be used everywhere. From the 16 construction details in this case study, we needed to use thermal block in only six of the details. So it's around 10% of the block in the building that needed to be thermal block. The details were the cable detail, the ground floor detail, the window jamb detail. We found that we were able to claim a lower psi-value. You can see on the top right-hand corner, it went from 0.08. So the starting point for this was a psi-value of 0.15. We did some modeling, we did some value calculations, which gave a lower value of 0.04. In this particular case study, the builder wanted to achieve savings in the building fabric cost, so we demonstrated savings of just over €7,000 for the house. The other approach that can be taken is to improve your BER. So you'll see on the left-hand side for the house, we start with an A3 rating of 53.67. We went option two, which was the default psi-value of 0.08, and we went option three, which is the thermally modeled Roadstone psi-value of 0.04. You can see the BER went from A3 to A2. So again, just outlined, there are different approaches that can be taken. Just in terms of the cost, and it's a question we're always asked, what is the cost to incorporate Roadstone thermal block into a building? It's pretty small in terms of the overall cost. So you'll see in the example I've given, it's actually in the brochure. If you pop over to us, we can give you some brochures. And in this particular job, the cost of incorporating the Roadstone block in this project was between €500 and €700. The approximate savings that were delivered were an improvement to BER of 10 kWh or whatever. So compare that to the savings that you can get if you look at your heating system, that's going to cost between €6,000 and €9,000. So I suppose the message of this one is it's so simple and so easy, it's so cost-effective, it's a solution that you can put into a priority. Maintenance is really easy. It's a fix in terms of bridging and addressing your Part L requirements. So just to recap, the Roadstone block, how it's done: it's a lower lambda value with a lighter concrete block, which reduces thermal bridging, results in reduced heat loss, lower heating bills for the house owner. It's an obvious one. Value engineering: we're not going to tell you it's needed everywhere, we would do this on a case-by-case basis. If you come talk to us on your project, we'll tell you where it's needed. Maintains thermal mass, again very important, and air tightness. So in terms of where we've come with our developments, we have online support. You can pop into the website, detail drawings are available for download from the website. We probably have over 70 details there. We've also developed bespoke details that we make available to use, which are bay window, eaves, threshold details. Developing models, we have support from our energy partners, Evolution Energy, based in Cork, really good thermal modelers. They will provide you with a psi-value certificate, very important for the BER certificate. So a technical brochure we have, and CPD where we're going around talking to designers, architects, builders. So we're available to pop in and give the CPD talk, which is essentially the same as this presentation. The Republic thing is just the point that we were looking off to, we won the Construct Ireland awards this year for the product, the SEAI award, and the Irish Construction Industry Award 2016. So it's good recognition of the development approach. As I said, I'm over, understand with my colleagues, please call or email if you want any more information. I appreciate that was a quick brush, so we're available for further questions. Thank you.